Steam Next Fest starts today with more than 8,000 entries, and developers are worried about AI clones

Steam Next Fest is back today, and it’s the biggest one yet by a wide margin. From now until next Monday you can download free demos of upcoming PC games, watch developer streams and wishlist anything you like.

When it runs: The October 2026 edition starts today, October 19, at 10 AM PT (1 PM ET) and ends Monday, October 26, at 10 AM PT, according to Valve’s Steamworks page for the event. Everything lives on the Steam Next Fest hub. On October 26, Valve will also publish a wrap-up of the games with the most-played demos. The next Next Fest is planned for February 2027.

It’s huge this time. PC Gamer counted 8,011 matches on the event’s press preview page, which opened to press on October 8. That’s about double June 2026’s festival. For comparison, the June 2022 Next Fest had just over 1,000 demos. The count is from the preview page, so the final number of live demos may come out a bit different.

Why it’s so big: PC Gamer’s Shaun Prescott blames a wave of quickly made games built with AI coding tools, and he doesn’t hold back about their quality. The same piece shows how this is already hurting real indie developers:

• One studio pulled its demo. Alliance Arts Inc., maker of the “Russian roulette drinking survival” game Drunken Goddess Reflux, won’t publish its demo on Steam as planned. “We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating this game’s presentation and gameplay could be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released ahead of the game’s launch,” the studio said. It will run closed play sessions instead.
• Clones are showing up within hours. PC Gamer counted at least seven Roblox copies of the indie game Escape the Walls after its creator posted footage on October 10.
• Code theft claims. NoGlyph, the developer of Needle In A Haystack, says another studio’s game released on October 16 contains its actual code, including 13 classes with the exact same names. NoGlyph has filed a copyright notice with Valve.

How to dig through it: With this many entries, Steam’s own recommendations and genre filters on the Next Fest page will do most of the work. Wishlisting the demos you enjoy is the best way to help the small teams you like get seen.

PPR take: Next Fest is still one of the best weeks of the year for PC players. You can find next year’s favorite indie for free before anyone else has heard of it. But when a real studio decides it’s safer not to show its demo, something is wrong with how discovery works on Steam. We’ll keep an eye out for space and sim demos worth your time this week.